Blogs

Hello WCRS listeners, you can come by and visit our booth at Comfest this year.

Our booth is located on the road way that runs through the park to the shelter house. We are on the left (if you are walking south) before the statue of Gooddale if you enter from park near the Gazebo stage.

It's the best way to meet your favorite show hosts and to find out more about the station and how you can get involved.

We have silk screened t-shirts we made ourselves featuring our new logo for sale.

Hello WCRS Listeners,
We are in the process of revamping this website. But in the meantime a new show has been added to the WCRS schedule.
Witches Brew will feature woman musicians and highlight local musical events with female musicians.

Every year that I am able I pay a visit to Big Sur, California, one of my favorite places since I was very small. I love the scenic drive up the rugged coast on the winding WPA-era highway One through the land where the mountains meet the sea. You've seen it in car commercials, and the famous chase scene from North by Northwest, and the picture in your mind, no doubt, is of the azure Pacific waters glistening in the sun as waves lap the rocky coast line below sloping Emerald meadows. As a kid I took all of this for granted, but I gradually came to realize that the ribbon of highway isn't the only feature there that is foreign to the natural landscape. The fact is that those brilliant swaths of Green shouldn't be there – and they wouldn't be were it not for the small herds of cows that regularly scour the fenced-in private ranches, allowing grasses to flourish where once there were coastal prairies and thickets of woods. The fact is that the Big Sur we have all seen in pictures and post cards for as long as we can remember is, in reality, a severely altered landscape, some of whose most iconic features are the result of large scale human-caused damage. In that sense, Big Sur, as we know it, is a perfect metaphor for the much larger environmental crisis facing the American prairies of the South and MidWest , and the way we have grown to accept the destructive agricultural practice known as “ranching” as an immutable facet of the American identity.

“The State of Our City is strong.” Those were the words that Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman said in the State of the City Celebration when asked about the state of Columbus in 2015.

From the format of the State of the City, it hardly seemed like the normal address. It felt more like a celebration of the achievements and accomplishments of an administration, and the work that needs to continue to keep Columbus shining in the spotlight long after Mayor Coleman’s run as Mayor wraps up at the end of this year.

“I think we’re in a renaissance,” Mayor Michael B. Coleman (Democrat) said in the interview-style State of the City Celebration at the Palace Theatre on Thursday in Downtown Columbus. Coleman cited the creation of 40,000 new jobs to the city, and the $ 7 Billion invested into the city.

The program, which started 26 minutes late, began with a moment of silence in remembrance of former Columbus Mayor Dana G. “Buck” Rinehart (Republican), who died on Wednesday, just days shy of his 69th birthday. Rinehart was Mayor of Columbus from 1984 to 1991, and like Coleman, helped develop the city’s growth with City Center Mall, the Short North Arts District, and a development that would later be Easton.

Following the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance, The Harmony Project singing the Phil Collins song “Take Me Home”, with a video playing on the screens overhead of neighborhoods throughout the city, to set the tone for what was ahead during the program.

Columbus is the hometown that has gone from “Cow Town” to competing with the likes of Philadelphia and Brooklyn for the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Columbus is the top city for Young Professionals.

Columbus was the top-ranked “Opportunity City” in Forbes Magazine. Columbus was ranked the top city for African-Americans in Ebony Magazine. Columbus received a score of 100 in the Human Rights Campaign Index. Columbus, in the 15 years that Coleman has been Mayor, has grown and made strides.

“The overall news is pretty good.” That was the message that Dr. Bill LaFayette preached at the Creekside Conference and Event Center as the 18th Annual Groundhog Day Economic Forecast Breakfast took place on January 30 in Gahanna.

LaFayette, who is the founder and CEO of Regionomics, an economic consulting firm based out of Columbus, gave the Keynote Presentation to an audience of approximately 200 attendees.

LaFayette gave a presentation, which was very positive and encouraging for the most part on job growth and economic development.

“I’ve been giving these speeches for 15 years now,” LaFayette said. “They’re fun now. For the first time, I don’t have to tell you to ‘brace for impact’. Things are good, both locally, and nationally.”

According to LaFayette’s 2015 Regionomics Columbus Forecast, the unemployment rate in the Columbus Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), which covers ten counties, is four percent even, compared to that of Ohio (4.8 percent) or the United States as a whole (5.4 percent). “Hiring has reached a pre-recession peak,” LaFayette added. In contrast, LaFayette added that the unemployment rate numbers only count the people who are actually actively looking for work, as the labor force itself continues to decline.

“The labor force started to fall in the Recession, and has continued falling ever since. The share of people in the labor force is the lowest since the late 1970s,” LaFayette said. “The four percent unemployment rate is real.”

Despite the labor force drop, employment is projected to surpass one million in 2015. 80,600 jobs were added to the Central Ohio region from January 2010 to June 2014, according to the numbers LaFayette presented, with a 9.2 percent increase in jobs.

In regards to the economy for Gahanna, LaFayette said, “The economy in the 43230 zip code (which serves most of Gahanna) is widely diversified, more diversified than in many zip codes in Central Ohio”.

Welcome to Conscious Voices, a weekly program dedicated to bringing you alternative points of view and to challenging popular assumptions in order to help you be better informed and civically engaged. I'm Evan Davis, your host for this edition. Well, if we are to believe the media reports, "calm" has returned to Ferguson, Missouri after nearly a week of nightly protests since the verdict of the grand jury investigation of the killing of Michael Brown, who was Black by police officer Darren Wilson, who is White. In an earlier edition of this program I criticized the media for reporting on clashes between demonstrators and police in Ferguson by saying that "violence erupted at demonstrations", or that "demonstrations turned violent", when as countless videos and witness accounts revealed, it was nearly always the police who initiated the violence, in the form of tear gas and rubber bullets which were used to disperse crowds of erstwhile peaceful protesters. Moreover, the violence in this particular chain of events started with the shooting of Michael Brown. But even that analysis fails to take in to account the much longer history - one that includes a decades-long legacy of institutionalized racism in the state of Missouri and the U.S, in general, some of the hallmarks of which are increasing racial segregation in places like Ferguson and East Cleveland, the sight of another questionable police killing of an un-armed, or nearly un-armed Black youth by white officers in just the last week. Ferguson has gone from being around 40% Black just a couple of decades ago to being over 70% Black today, which its over-all population hasn't changed. Its police force, however, remains over 90% white, with most of those officers residing in other Saint Louis suburbs. Unemployment in Black communities remains much higher than the reported national average, yet expenses are high as ever.

In my assessment, the transfer of control of the Senate probably doesn't portend drastic changes - at least not immediately. The Republicans probably won't try to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, though a few promised their supporters they would. If they try, Obama will veto it, and they still won't have enough votes to override the veto. Likewise, they won't be able to push through major policy changes in the short term - but that's not really the danger here. The two remaining years of Obama's presidency will be measured not so much in terms of terrible policies he'll have prevented, but, rather, in terms of badly needed policies that now will have virtually no chance of passing. With Republicans in control, we will never see progress on climate change or carbon emissions. There will be no Federal jobs bill. or sensible gun law reform. nor restoration of funding for essential programs like education , or subsidies for renewable energy.

Bryan Curtiss, Writer

Sharing success was the theme of this year’s State of the City Address in Columbus. However, three barriers – homelessness, unemployment, and education, were the focal points of Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman’s 15th Annual State of the City Address on Wednesday night.

In what was a reality check for most people in attendance at the Battelle Grand Ballroom of the Greater Columbus Convention Center, the city’s homeless was one of the big topics of the State of the City Address, and Coleman made it a goal to "rebuild the lives of the homeless."

"Columbus is a community of stark and sobering contrasts. Some bask in the glow of our success while others struggle every day just to see the light," Coleman remarked about the homeless population in the city. Columbus has a high poverty rate, with some neighborhoods having over 30 percent unemployment rates. The Median Household Income for Columbus residents is $ 8,000 below National Average.

Coleman then told the struggles of two homeless people living in the Faith Mission Shelter while striving for a better life for themselves. One was of a technical worker who ended up homeless due to loss of income, and another was of a dislocated worker, who chose to stay in Columbus, rather than relocate to another city.

“Sharing our success means ensuring our residents have roofs over their heads and strong neighborhoods to live in,” Coleman said.

"Homelessness is becoming a bigger problem in this city than in this city's history," Coleman added. This winter alone, there have been an estimated 1,200 homeless residents in the city, with approximately 150 of them being turned away from overcrowded shelters, left to "fend for themselves".

Coleman proposed that $ 1.1 Million will be used to combat homelessness, partnering with the Community Shelter Board on the nation’s first case management system of customized intensive individual care.